On 11/17/2018 12:29 PM, Bill wrote:
wrote:
On Fri, 16 Nov 2018 23:57:37 -0500,
wrote:

On Fri, 16 Nov 2018 17:14:58 -0500, John H.
wrote:

Interesting article. Looks promising.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46219656


===

It does sound promising but workable fusion has been anywhere from 5
to 30 years away for a long time.

That is the way I see it. We are damned good at an uncontrolled fusion
reaction tho.
We understand how to start them up. We just don't know how to do it in
a bottle. The problems make disposing of some spent fuel rods seem
trivial compared to fusion without blowing up the city if the plasma
gets away from you.


The plasma getting away, just seems to make the fire go out. I live the
next city over from the Lawrence Livermore Labs and they have been studying
fusion for a long time. They know very well how to make uncontainable
fusion. But getting a positive energy result out of the reactor is the
problem. They have got out more energy than they put in, but not enough to
pay for the process.
https://www.llnl.gov/news/nif-achiev...e-fusion-yield

Luddite can go back in to the business of making thin film energy capsules.


The thin film deposition systems we built for the Laboratory for Laser
Energetics ( University of Rochester, Omega project) was used to put
thin film coatings on the large laser optics used in the laser beam
line. Without the coatings the power of the laser would destroy the glass.

When NIF was built, the power of it's laser was many times that
of the Omega system. Lawrence Livermore went out for bids for the
necessary coatings but nobody could meet the necessary laser damage
threshold. They ended up having the coatings done (at least initially)
in the system we had built for Omega because it was the only one that
could come close to meeting the specs. It was more "know-how" by the
thin film engineers than the system but it was a feather in our cap
none-the-less.

Turns out the laser damage was probably one of the reasons the project
at Lawrence Livermore was abandoned, although not the only reason.
The power in those laser beams is just too much for many of the optics,
even with highly sophisticated coatings. The optics used are incredibly
expensive to make, polish and coat.